FELIX: A SERIES OF NEW WRITING
presents a reading by
MARK NOWAK & PHILIP METRES
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 - 4:30 P.M.
ROOM 126, MEMORIAL LIBRARY, UW-MADISON
Do not capitalize the following
when they stand alone: judge, justice
Capitalize President
Capitalize Vice President
Capitalize Senator, Conressman
Capitalize Speaker
Capitalize Governor, Mayor, Cardinal
That “here” was located at some imaginary point
between General Electric itself and your living room.
But unlike more recent TV pitchmen,
such as Lee Iacocca and Frank Perdue,
Reagan was never burdened
with the pretense that he was himself
part of the actual production.
--Mark Nowak, from “Capitalization”
MARK NOWAK is a documentary poet, social critic, and labor activist. He is the author of Revenants, Shut Up Shut Down (afterword by Amiri Baraka), and Coal Mountain Elementary (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. His writings on new labor poetics have recently appeared in The Progressive, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan UP), and Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke UP). In addition to facilitating “poetry dialogues” between Ford autoworkers at plants in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, South Africa, Nowak is editing a section on late-apartheid worker poets for an anthology forthcoming from Wesleyan as well as a special double issue of the journal he founded in 1996, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, on South African literature and social movements.
PHILIP METRES is poet, translator, and scholar. He is the author of a number of poetry collections and books of translation including To See the Earth (2008), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003), as well as the critical study, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007). He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili.
What to say? Love, I live for the letters
I must wait to open. They bear across
this land, where I find myself at a loss—
each word a wintering seed.
--Philip Metres, from “Ashberries: Letters”
The Felix series is dedicated to providing an audience for new writing, and to highlighting the publication of the independent press. Felix readings are FREE and open to the public.
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